Assume the following:
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You add a contact (let's refer to them as "Person A") to your iPhone and add two separate numbers for them – one entry labeled "Home", and the other as "Work"
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You open Messages.app, and compose a new message to Person A's Home phone number – this creates a new message thread, because up until this point you hadn't ever messaged them previously
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Person A then replies to your message, but using the number that you have labeled as "Work"
Whenever the above scenario was encountered, I can recall that in older builds of iOS that two message threads would have been created – one for each number (in this case, Home and Work). Now, however, iOS appears to combine the conversations from both numbers into a single message thread because it recognises that despite being separate physical phone numbers, the contact is still the same person.
So – my question. Would somebody be able to clarify which version of iOS introduced the new behaviour described above?
Best Answer
The merging of message-threads with the same contact was introduced in iOS 12. But Apple didn’t officially announce it, what caused a lot of confusion, because sometimes it also merged different contacts: Forbes: Apple iOS 12 Has An Embarrassing Problem